


denial, denial, denial, denial, acceptance

by v3ilfire



Series: champagne pouring over us [5]
Category: Saints Row
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-10
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2018-08-30 03:32:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8516833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/v3ilfire/pseuds/v3ilfire
Summary: Johnny Gat survived a katana to the gut, so it just made sense that he'd survive a plane crash. He had to survive the plane crash. He promised he'd survive the plane crash.





	

Being drunk and operating a remote missile system was _maybe_ not the best idea, but after jumping in and out of planes all night Lucia felt like she deserved to find a friend in a half-liter of vodka. Plus, if she was sober enough to climb up a fire escape and plop herself down on the roof of a Friendly Fire, she could definitely manage to _not_ fire a bunch of missiles into the lake. And if she did, well… fuck the fish, right?

She took another drink as she opened up the computer in her lap. Unfortunately, it was pretty damn clear that the range of the drone camera wasn’t what she’d hoped it be at all, barely covering the surrounding few blocks. Lucia swore under her breath, but she wouldn’t be put off yet. A lot of random buttons were subject to the wrath of her clumsy fingers, but eventually she found the ‘zoom out’ function and, consequently, the ass-end of a plane sticking right out of the fucking water.

With the vodka and computer back in her bag, Lucia made her way down the fire escape. She regret her decision to just jump down the moment she landed hard on her knee and felt the blood begin pour out of the new scrape, but there was no more time to waste. The roar of a motorcycle engine pushed her to her feet and out into the middle of the street, where even vodka couldn’t slow her down enough to miss smacking some punk kid straight off his shit bike.

She spent the ride missing the Kenshin she stole from the Ronin and feeling grateful for the empty streets, mostly because those thoughts kept the nagging worry out of her head. Shaundi had spent the entire night screaming that Johnny Gat was gone, but Lucia knew that if the motherfucker could survive a katana to the gut, he could definitely live through a plane crash with some pretentious Belgian prick. Her bet was definitely on finding him on that weird monument island, soaking wet and counting all the sick guns he scraped up from the piles of debris around him, and she’d drag his ass back to the apartment in time for breakfast. Shaundi would cry, Pierce would pretend he _wasn’t_ crying, she’d be right, blah blah blah, same shit as usual.

Besides, there was no way that he could have died. After all the people they’d buried, he promised her he wouldn’t, and Johnny Gat had never broken a promise.

The bike and its shit brakes stopped a little too close to the water’s edge for comfort, but hey, at least it _stopped_ . Lucia slid gracelessly off the seat, too focused on the plane sticking out of the water in front of her to give three shits about balancing. The debris had already stopped smoking somehow, but that didn’t change the fact that seeing the tail of a plane in a lake was a little… uncomfortable. Lucia swallowed past the lump in her throat to yell out.  
“ _Ay, vaquero!_ Cavalry’s here.” She threw her bag down on the ground and fished the bottle of vodka out of it. “And I got booze. Figured I owed you a drink.”

Silence.

Undeterred, she took her phone out of her back pocket and turned the flashlight on, though no matter where she shone it, there was no hint of Johnny Gat. She felt her heart gearing up to beat its way into her throat but _no_ , there was no way, _Gat was not dead._ “I swear to God,” she muttered, and quickly dialed his phone. It was the only number she had bothered to memorize.  
A woman’s voice. _We’re sorry, the call cannot be completed as dialed._   
“ _Perra!_ ” she barked back at the recording, and hung up. She kept hearing echoes of Shaundi’s fucking _wailing_ in her head, more and more insistent the longer she went without results. “If you’re trying to be funny, _vaquero_ , you should stick to your day job.”

Silence. Comedy wasn’t really Johnny’s thing anyway.

In that moment, the shoes had to come off. As soon as she kicked one off her foot, the difference between one high heel and one flat foot knocked Lucia straight on her ass, but that didn’t stop her. She pried the second bootie off and stripped from her jacket, completely ignoring the river of dried blood running down her shin. As per usual, among all the different voices clashing in her head, the one that feared drowning stood no chance and there was no one to talk her out of swimming to the plane before she could even put words to the thought.

Lucia found the gaping hole in the hull fast enough, though not without scratching her arm on something sharp on her way in. She surfaced in the tail end clinging to what was left of a seat and gasping for air in the pitch darkness, only then realizing how _bad_ the initial idea even was. The windows offered little moonlight and the water, even less, and it didn’t take a genius (or even a sober person) to realize that the wreck that she was occupying was only _half_ the fucking plane that crashed. “Johnny?” she asked the darkness, as if she wouldn’t be able to see him in the ten square feet around and above her.

At some point in her swim back outside, up and down stopped making sense and she very nearly ran out of air in the middle of her mistake. As soon as she burst through the water, gasping for air, the waves pushed her against the wreckage and left her clinging, waiting to catch her breath. It took what was left of her willpower and even more luck to find the right dents and crevices in the hull to pull herself out of the water and shivering onto the tail.

There was no more silence, not anymore. She couldn’t hear a damn thing aside from her pounding heart and her chattering teeth and the waves and Shaundi’s voice and that fucking _wail_ Carlos let out the moment she tried to touch him, the sick sound Aisha made when Jyunichi’s blade decapitated her. There could be no quiet while the world spun mad circles around her, taunting her for being too slow. Too slow for Lin, too slow for Aisha, too slow for Carlos, too slow for Johnny. She yelled for him again - screamed, really, and kept screaming until her own throat was trying to choke her hopeless wails into silence. Exactly _when_ she started crying was anyone’s guess, but the tears made everything around her too blurry to fucking matter. She had to sit down, she needed a fucking _minute_ , but the moment her knees started to bend the vodka decided to remind her exactly who was in charge and robbed her of the scrap of balance that was keeping her upright on a slanted plane. Lucia fell hard and fast into the water and her fucking _face_ hit _something_ hard on the way down.

Scratched, scraped, and nearly drowned _twice_ in the same night, Lucia dragged herself ashore and let herself fall face-first onto the lakeside, which was exactly when she realized that her nose was fucking broken. She turned her head to the side, but her body didn’t budge. If she didn’t trust her drunk ass to set her nose straight, there was no fucking way any 3am Steelport nurse was going to see Lucia Valdez of the Saints bloody _and_ crying. She was going to get all this shit out _now_.

So she sobbed alone on the shore, clutching the grass underneath her hands. All the fucking tears she’d saved for Lin and Carlos and Aisha, all the times she didn’t cry because if either her or Johnny started, neither would stop - all of that was coming out. Alone and bruised and broken in fucking Steelport, robbed of her best friend and her dignity, she cried.   
  
And threw up, at some point, but at least _that_ she could blame on the alcohol.

The morning came soon enough, ripe with opportunity and sketchy motherfuckers that were completely okay with buying a stolen motorcycle from some skinny girl wearing aviators and a cast on her nose. The bike _had_ been a piece of shit, but Lucia was a fast talker and had a couple of extra grand in her pocket before the idiot knew any better. Though not a ton of money to start with, it was enough to get her clothes, makeup, some decent pot, a better gun, and breakfast for what was left of the Saints. A bit of lipstick and a pair of shades did a _lot_ to cover up how swollen her eyes were.

She kicked the door to Shaundi’s apartment open with enough of a bang to jump-start Pierce right out of a nap and make Shaundi groan from the other room.   
“Get up,” she yelled, “Breakfast.”   
“What the _fuck_ , man,” Pierce yawned, face in his hands. Lucia set the tray of coffee down on the nearest table and dropped a bag of breakfast sandwiches next to it. “And what the fuck happened to your _face_ ?”   
“You should see the other guy,” she answered, and dropped the rest of the money she’d scraped up on the table. That would be the end of _that_ line of questioning.

Shaundi dragged herself to the table, eyes raw from crying, but unlike Lucia she did not even try to cover them up. She pulled a coffee towards herself and held onto it, warming her hands on the paper cup and _refusing_ to look at Lucia.   
“You’ve been busy,” she said, so hoarse that Lucia almost felt bad for chain-popping the cough drops she stole from the hospital until she sounded like a person again.   
“Did you even sleep?”   
“We let Johnny die,” Shaundi snapped. “No, I didn’t fucking _sleep_ .”  
“Well you should,” Lucia answered, and she thought she did pretty good at sounding unaffected. “The Syndicate ain’t just gonna stop at Johnny, and _I_ am not gonna stop ‘till that motherfucking Belgian waffle motherfucker’s neck is underneath my foot. And that means I need you and Pierce.”

 _I need you and Pierce ‘cause I don’t have Gat anymore_.

Shaundi didn’t say anything in response, not even as she reached for a breakfast sandwich and muttered something about missing Freckle Bitch’s, and Lucia would just have to take that as a small victory. Pierce joined her at the table and, for a moment, things felt normal. And if that normal came at the cost of never shedding another tear for Lin, or Carlos, or Aisha, or Johnny motherfucking Gat… well, fuck.

Maybe if they got normal enough she wouldn’t _need_ to cry over anyone else.


End file.
